A few weeks back I wrote a piece detailing the Neverwinter Nights games as a desktop RPG replacement. I’d come to realize that there were a lot of things that had changed in my life since I’d regularly played pen-and-paper RPGs with my buddies in high school and the military. Most of us live far apart now but still fondly recall those tales of heroism and combat whenever we chance to catch up.

I’m luckier than many of my friends – I still have a group of players locally to enjoy this hobby with, but many of them are in areas where they have no gathering point like a local game store or the local hangout is not filled with people they would trust inviting into their homes.

This realization led me to thinking about the convergence of technology that we are seeing on a regular basis. Thanks to Voice over IP technology, widely available fast Internet service and the ubiquitous nature of the PC or Mac in most households as a work tool if not a gaming one, I wondered just what options there were to reconnect players and their games and gaming friends, regardless of geography.

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This week I’m going to step back a bit from the reviews and products and talk about the concept of evil. I was reminded of this concept because I was fortunate enough to begin a new tabletop role playing game and the players as a unit decided they wanted to play evil characters. They wanted the freedom to do bad things for the right reasons as well as good things for the wrong ones. This whole discussion got me thinking about the nature of evil in games.

While many games, like Dungeons & Dragons, have a firm moral system that determines the “alignment” on the axis of good or evil there is really little evidence that most games follow this concept closely. We see evidence of evil in most game storylines or scenarios – “the power hungry dictator is trying to conquer the world and you must stop him!” or “The evil wizard has enslaved all the nubile young maidens and made them his love thralls with his magic and only you can liberate them!” These types of stories are rife in games of all kinds – from tabletop to the HDTV set.

When a game approaches the concept a little differently, like by allowing the player to be the “evil” character ,people tend to revel in the novelty but the portrayal of evil is still just the cardboard mustache twirling baddie with no real motivation or drive other than greed or insanity. Most games fail to make the bad guy anywhere near as interesting as I’d like.

The recent Bioware games – dating back to Baldur’s Gate even – often break that trend and show us flawed people with skewed perspectives. Bioware has constantly done a good job in both enabling the player to see villains as more than bullet catching, plan spewing baddies and in allowing some degree of player choice that is less than honorable in their games.

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Chocolate and Peanut butter might have sounded insane when first proposed but I think most of us would agree that it worked out alright in practice. Combining the Playstation 3 and a Collectible Card Game however.. well the jury’s still out on that one.

I can still remember sitting at the Sony E3 2006 Press Conference at Sony Studios when Phil Harrison walked onstage and introduced the Eye of Judgment and the upgraded Playstation 3 Eye camera accessory. I was a bit shocked to be honest that Sony wanted to get into the Pokemon game with the market in a decline but the concept of marrying a card game with the PS3 sounded interesting enough.

November of last year I finally got a chance to play Eye of Judgment. After years of CCG gaming I was hardly impressed by the simple mechanics, very limited tactics and dearth of expansion packs at retail for me to explore. I came into my playing looking for a sort of virtual Magic the Gathering – a game that was basically simple to teach but with a good deal of hidden depth for those who choose to master it. Judgment failed to deliver that.
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We’re taking a break this week from the virtual game table series to soak in some of the information on the upcoming D & D Insider after last weekends D&D Experience in Washington DC. Instead I thought I’d take some time to talk about one of the classic games that just about any true blooded strategy gamer will likely recall with one part nostalgia and one part pain: Risk. And lest you wonder what the video game angle is here, EA recently signed a long term agreement with Hasbro to create online versions of their board and card games – so its likely that we’ll see this game in a new form soon.

I was one of the lucky 1000 who received the preview version of the forthcoming Risk update. Now I’ve not played Risk 2210 more than once nor have I played Risk Godstorm but I’ve logged far too many hours in my life rolling the red and white dice in my ploy to take over the Napoleonic world.
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This week we kick off the first in a series of columns focusing on bringing the pen-and-paper experience of RPGs to life using technology, tools and primarily the internet.

With the big announcement of the Wizards of the Coast Digital Initiative, the expansion of Gleemax and the forthcoming D&D 4th Edition digital toolkit, it seemed a good time to work toward our eventual review of these services by looking at what tools are currently available for gamers to virtualize their game sessions.

Seeing that this is a video game website it feels most appropriate to discuss first the video game entry in the virtual desktop series – Atari’s Neverwinter Nights series. Developer Bioware began the Neverwinter Nights project almost a decade ago with the stated intent of not only taking their popular Forgotten Realms adventure series into the 3D world but also to provide players and dungeon masters the tools necessary to truly recreate the experience of a tabletop session of D&D on the net in a video game.

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“What’s my motivation?” he asked as I handed him the character sheet for the leader of the Kobolds.
“Well you’ve got no food and you need to feed the tribe.” I responded.
“Okay, so I’m leading the Kobolds to hunt down the humans and eat them!” he exclaimed.
“No, probably not the smartest tactic. Humans, even base humans are stronger and tougher than you are.”
“Oh. Well what about their livestock?” his eyes lit up.
“This is an area of rolling hills, there are many sheep and cows. Livestock is a core product of the village.” I could hear the other players chatting. They had assembled for the session and were sitting there getting their obligatory Monte Python references out before the game started.
“Good. Then can I change my alignment?”
“Why would you want to change your alignment?” I asked.
“Well it says he’s Chaotic Evil. I don’t think of him as evil, just really, really hungry.”
“Okay, so what alignment is that then?” I asked.
“Why Chaotic Hungry of course!”

Interchanges like that remind me why I enjoy playing with real people more than online in a game like World of Warcraft. Where else would you hand a new player, someone who is just coming into the game that night, a monster to play only to have an interchange like that?
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I’ve made no secret that I’m a fan of the Warhammer 40K games, both digital and analog – though the cost of entry generally has kept me away from the tabletop versions of Warhammer 40K. I’ve lapped up reading materials, novels, and enjoyed the story put forth in the various video games that have graced both the PC and consoles over the last two decades but the one thing I’ve always craved was to bring the dark gothic universe of the Space Marines to life in a tabletop role-playing game session.

The process of conversion never went smoothly for me because I often found it hard to grab players the way the setting had grabbed me as both a DM and fan. When I first heard about the Warhammer 40K based RPG Dark Heresy I was jumping out of my seat in excitement.

Finally, an officially licensed and sanctioned RPG was coming!

Finally, I could hand a player a rulebook and let it sell the setting for me, I could work more on creating epic tales and framing character stories instead of worrying about the minutia of a rule conversion and balance!

Well Dark Heresy hit the street in a bittersweet event that has upset many fans of the game and those with high hopes for the continued expansion of the 40K universe outside the miniature rules or in video games. Not because of its lack of quality or faith with the setting but because of a business decision by Black Industries, the game’s publisher.

Immediately upon launch it was announced the line would end with just three books. Three Books? Would that be worth the investment or was I better off going back to the conversion drawing board? How could they possibly translate this system in three tomes? Well I picked up the core book with trepidation and began to read. Did they make a worthy game? Was it worth the $50 investment? Well let me tell you..
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A few years back, while trying desperately to perfect my RTS skills for an upcoming LAN party, I decided it was time to take a break. I made a visit my local gaming store to look at the recent book releases, hoping to find a new d20 related resource to help energize a slowly fading campaign. Browsing the shelves, I noticed a group hovering around the gaming tables that were almost always filled by Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic players. This time instead of paper cards in shiny plastic “card condoms” there were small plastic miniatures and a tape measure arrayed out before them.

“What the hell?” I wondered, these guys never put away their binders of cards, yet they were absorbed in this new game, picking up the pieces, turning something on the base and making clicking sounds as they advanced across the tabletop.

This was my first exposure to the addiction that I now call “Plastic Death”. I watched as the players pulled out a few miniatures, recorded their point values and then randomly placed cups and plates upside down on the 3′ x 3′ playing surface. The players surveyed the landscape like Douglas MacArthur and Hideki Tojo looking for advantage in the battlefield. It wasn’t long before my curiosity got the best of me and I sat down to play a demonstration scenario.

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Sure you’ve been playing pen-and-paper RPGs for a while now, but the time has come to try and convert the unbelievers. How does one grab hold of a video game obsessed culture of gamers and tear them away from World of Warcraft or Mass Effect long enough to get them sitting down to play in your world? Simple, bring the game world they love to your table as well.

Unlike the 70’s and 80’s, the concept of introducing a role-playing game to friends and other potential players has become difficult. Often there are conversations among fans of D&D and other RPGs that the video game generation has stolen the future away.

How do hobbies that involve physical and social interaction compete with the global attraction of an MMO? How can players not feel cheated when the die rolls don’t make the enemy graphically explode and players have to imagine the special effects and particle physics instead of simply turning on their consoles and computers?

Simple. Tabletop games are party games. They rely on a group storytelling method and allow players to really and truly live out fantasy and adventure not easily modeled by finite scenarios in a video game.

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Illustration by Lars Grant-West. (c) 2008 Wizards of the Coast, Inc.

In the spirit of our new feature, the Analog Gamer, I’m going to take a few minutes to tell you guys about something a little different. Today is a holiday. It doesn’t appear on most calendars, but it’s a holiday nonetheless. Today is Appreciate a Dragon Day.

Dragons have long been iconic characters of myth and legend. Whether you’re referring to dragons of fantasy, hunted by valiant knights; dragons of literature in works of fiction; or MMO raid bosses, dragons have captivated everyone who has thought of them.

So, the question now becomes, how do we celebrate this holiday? How do we pay homage to these mythical beasts? Certainly you could get your gaming buddies together for a rousing game of Dungeons and Dragons. You can even have your party go dragon hunting! If you’re an WoW player, how about heading into Onyxia’s Lair and downing the fearsome wyrm?

If you’re looking for more ways to celebrate, the folks over at Wizards of the Coast have a helpful little list:

• Invite a friend to try Dungeons & Dragons for the first time
• Show your appreciation for Fourth Edition’s new metallic dragons by “friending” the Adamantine dragon on Facebook and giving him gifts
• Visit Enworld.com or other D&D fan sites and share stories of how you’ve used dragons in your 3.5 campaign
• Google “dragon” and see what shows up! Read about the way dragons have infiltrated popular culture and some of the classic dragon myths
• Pop some popcorn and watch movies about dragons, both the friendly and unfriendly varieties – Dragon Heart, Eragon, Dragonlance, Reign of Fire, the Shrek series, Pete’s Dragon
• Pull out your old Halloween costume and dress like a dragon

For a little more on this holiday, check out the Wizards of the Coast news post on it, which includes the little known fact that Winston Churchill employed a small dragon to help light his ever-present cigar.

If any of you guys decide to observe this holiday, we’d love to see some photos of your celebration. Send them off to podcast@filefront.com, and you very well may see yourself on the site in the near future! Remember, like the wise man says, “Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”